In the new excitement and interests, to which Old Walker's lectures gave birth, Shelley's care for English literature languished. Like other children he cared only for the new toy. Like other boys possessed by the scientific mania, he for a while delighted in nothing but his scientific apparatus, contrivances, experiments. For a time it was true that he cared for no learning that his masters taught. During this passion for the experimental study of scientific phenomena, one of his exploits was to lay a long train of gunpowder between a decaying tree and a point, at some distance from the tree, and then to fire the gunpowder by means of a burning-glass,--with a result altogether satisfactory to the youthful experimentalist,--but less satisfactory to the owner of the ancient tree, and by no means to the approval of the masters, who were responsible for the behaviour of the boys, and for the safety of the buildings of Eton College. On another occasion, after his transference from Mr. Hexter's house to the house of the gentleman described by Mr. Packe as 'one of the dullest men of the establishment,' he was busy at dead of night in his bedroom with his 'chemical studies' (as they are grandly styled by the Shelleyan enthusiasts), when he upset a frying-pan full of ingredients into the fire, with consequences that roused all the sleepers in the house, and made them in the morning congratulate themselves on not having been burnt to death in their beds by Mad Shelley. It certainly does not sustain Mr. Packe's contemptuous opinion of the tutor, that Mr. Bethell was bright enough to think he had better check his pupil's enthusiasm for scientific inquiry. It can scarcely be regarded as evidence of his dullness that this gentleman felt it his duty to see what Mad Shelley was after, and take steps to preserve his house and its inmates from the quick destruction, with which they were threatened by the rather lawless proceedings of an eccentric boy. With this purpose in view, Mr. Bethell paid Shelley's room a visit at a moment, when the young gentleman was then and there enlarging his knowledge of nature, by the scientific production of a blue flame, though the boys of Mr. Bethell's house had been forbidden to produce blue or any other flame in their bedrooms. 'Chemical experiments,' airily remarks Lady Shelley, who, taking the story from the page of a previous writer, seems to think it even more to her father-in-law's credit than to the tutor's manifest shame, 'were prohibited in the boys' chambers; and the tutor (Mr. Bethel) somewhat angrily asked what the lad was doing. Shelley jocularly replied that he was raising the devil. Mr. Bethel seized hold of a mysterious implement on the table, and in an instant was thrown against the wall, having grasped a highly charged electrical machine. Of course the young experimentalist paid dearly for this unfortunate occurrence.'